Moving to the Cloud with Telindus
Adopting a cloud strategy is not just a change in technology. It is a change in tools, processes and skills. Regulation is opening up towards public cloud, in particular in the financial services industry, and the convergence between big data and artificial intelligence has also given raise to new potentials of digital transformation. With concerns around security, hybrid cloud usage complexities and identifying cloud potentials, using a partner for cloud transition is becoming more and more a necessity. Thomas Scherer, Chief Architect at Telindus Luxembourg, explains why switching to the cloud with Telindus is the best option.
What kind of cloud solutions are you offering to your customers?
Telindus is delivering a variety of cloud solutions that allow our customers – large companies, SMEs and start-ups – to increase their performance, reduce their costs and improve their efficiency and competitiveness. U-share is our flexible and fully secure file-sync-and-share service to provide exchange and collaborative work on documents. U-free is our Desktop as a Service solution. The customers access a virtual office and their business applications at all times by connecting through a secure portal on any device (PC, Mac, tablet, smartphone). Also, we offer U-touch for our unified communication services combining on one high-performance and secure platform IP telephony, fixed-mobile convergence, video conferencing, collaboration and instant messaging. Our flagship cloud product is U-flex, an ultra-secure private cloud solution. In its third evolution, U-flex provides public cloud interoperability with the major public clouds, thereby Telindus offers hybrid cloud services. U-select is proposed in combination with U-flex. It allows our customers to automate manual day-to-day tasks to service their employees without manual interaction.
What are the key benefits of Telindus cloud services?
Our private managed cloud platform, U-flex, is fully redundantly hosted across two Tier IV data centres in Luxembourg. U-flex offers flexible combinations of housing, dedicated and shared infrastructure hosting solutions as well as numerous managed services, such as managed databases and security services – firewalling or proxy services – and standard enterprise solutions like email, collaboration or telephony services.
But this flexibility does not end at the infrastructure hosting options: our teams can support our customers in the daily management of their IT landscape, whether it is based on dedicated or shared workloads. This day-to-day management is designed in such a way that the services can be expanded into the public cloud, creating the foundation of our hybrid cloud offering by providing overall IT and security consistency and thereby portability of services.
Reliable connectivity is often crucial for hybrid deployments. Hence, we offer private WAN solutions to interconnect on-premise deployments with U-flex and all public clouds in a fully meshed mode. It also includes the possibility to establish private WAN connectivity for the public cloud providers’ inter-regional traffic.
Why should companies choose Telindus cloud solutions? What are your added values?
Telindus is supervised by Luxembourg’s financial regulator (Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier or CSSF) for providing IT services to financial institutions. In 2017, the regulator published a circular governing the use of public clouds by financial institutions. When using public clouds, several conditions have to be fulfilled to ensure control over data and IT infrastructures. We have put in place the necessary resources to meet those control requirements. It can be on a contractual basis – such as audit rights for instance – or a technical basis – mitigating lock-in risk or controlling data location for example. We have proactively created the necessary contractual and technical framework so that our customers do not need to handle the fulfilment process by themselves anymore. It turns out that this set of measures is not only an asset for financial institutions, but also for our customers in general as it enables secure and controlled usage of clouds.
Telindus also offers public cloud solutions. What are the advantages?
We want to offer what is best for our customers. All public cloud providers, such as Amazon Web services, Google Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure, have unique strengths, which can significantly drive our customers’ digital transformation. We keep track with the quickly evolving cloud industry to support our customers to identify the most valuable cloud workloads for them; this may be to reduce costs, increase time to market or to create new business opportunities for them by digitalising or innovating their digital product portfolio. We help them to install, integrate, operate and evolve their cloud installations always while keeping customer data and IT infrastructures secured.